


Falling and Getting Back Up

by vmprsm



Series: LC Destin [10]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Forehead Kisses, Kissing, Major Character Injury, Major Original Character(s), Post-Battle of Starkiller Base, Starkiller Base, Trauma, a laundry list of injuries, life in the first order, see end notes for injuries if you are worried you may react badly to one as i dont want to spoil it, so basically starkiller goes boom like in the movie but then a bunch of stuff happens afterwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 12:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10876356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vmprsm/pseuds/vmprsm
Summary: The fall of Starkiller happens very quickly and with little time to think.Or, we all know what happens in the movie. This is what happens to Destin.





	Falling and Getting Back Up

**Author's Note:**

> There will be a couple more Starkiller-creation fics that canonically happen before this one that are still in the wroks, but I worked really hard on this and a friend wanted to see it, so I'm posting it early. I may end up taking this down when the others are done so it can all stay in timeline order, but we'll see.

The fall of Starkiller happens very quickly and with little time to think. 

Skyler is down near the core, in a full radiation suit, for the second time in a single cycle. She watches the gauges as they fill and the meters twitch in their acceptable ranges as the star above them, past kilometers of rock and metal and space, is systematically sucked into the center of the planet. She was in this exact spot the first time the draw bar reached ninety-eight percent, then her and her crew had moved into the bunker as the weapon was fired. She did not see it happen, but Destin had been assured it was magnificent. There will be footage to review later, surely, but things had been so busy in the cooldown stages, and then the order came to prep it again. Destin had followed up her short  _ Congratulations _ , message to Hux a few hours later with a short  _ Are you sure?  _ but had not received a reply. 

Therefore, she follows orders, taking special care to watch all the processes complete herself, either in person or through her pad, to assure that the strain on the weapon wouldn’t be too much. Theoretically, with the cooldown cycle completed, there should be no issue firing again, but theory was simply that.

The charging completion bar bumps over to ninety percent and she thinks, how many more hours will I be awake before this is over? After this was the second cooldown, which she would take on with extreme care, and then preparing to hyperjump the whole damn planet to a new star. If the Death Star could do it, so could they, and according to projections it should be even easier than jumping a Death Star, given the stability of the components of the planet. 

At ninety two percent, she glances at her pad again. No further orders. The weapon would fire again in only minutes, as soon a Colonel Datoo gave the order, following General Hux’s, to create the breach that would allow the harnessed energy to escape. She quadruple checks the coordinates as her crew buzzes around her. 

When the alarm goes off, chaos erupts. The crew knows what to do in case of a malfunction emergency, but the sudden slew of intel that Resistance X-wings are attacking the thermal oscillator throws a wrench into the whole process. Do they try to stabilize the damage? Aren’t the oscillator shields holding? How did the Resistance get in in the first place? There are too many questions, there’s nothing for it except to go over there herself. 

Two high-speed elevators and one short minute later, Destin finds herself halfway across the planet and near the surface, stepping into the belly of the thermal oscillator. There are stormtroopers marching everywhere, looking lost but trying to appear under orders, and there’s an undercurrent of fear that is hard to ignore. Above, as she leans over a railing and tilts her face up, she can see Kylo Ren moving off the walkway that spans across the opening near the top. He’s just a speck from her distance, and it suddenly matters much less when the sounds of blaster fire reach her ears, bouncing off the metal walls. What the hell is going on? Are there Resistance fighters  _ in _ the oscillator?

Thankfully, she runs away from the railing towards a support console to check on the status of the oscillator and assess damage, and that is when the explosions start. The whole chamber shudders as the noise momentarily deafens her. The specs map is blossoming red on the holoscreen as damage is instantaneously catalogued, but the stability is still good enough. A glance to her pad, less than a minute to firing. As long as nothing else happens, it will hold. She just has to find cover.

More explosions, and these ones closer to her; she looks out to see an X-wing _in the oscillator_ _hollow_. It zips back up as the console alarm blares in her already-sensitive ears. The oscillator is going critical, there’s too much stress now, too many holes. There’s nothing left to do except get out. 

There’s a moment, between  _ What can I do, _ and  _ Mother of moons,  _ where Destin thinks about Hux. Does he know? He has to. She opens a line to the bridge as she runs back towards the elevator. It rings out for a few seconds, then the line drops. From interference or a hang up, there’s no way to tell, but a secondary problem presents itself: the elevator won’t respond. There’s a good chance all of them have gone down, and there isn’t time to go checking.There’s no other way out of the oscillator except to run up.

A quick message.  _ I’m sorry. _ If she doesn’t get out, it is an apology for not saying goodbye, for what he will state is her utter stupidity for going to the oscillator in the first place, if any of her crew manages to live to tell him. If she does, it's an apology for not being able to stop it, for not staying at her post and ensuring the weapon fires.

Going back to the core is an idea for a moment, but there’s no way back in time if the sub-base high speeds aren’t working. Another glance at the pad confirms: the whole weapon is backing up, with no functional process to stabilize the quintessence bottled up inside the crust containment field. If the weapon had been at fifty percent, if the collection could have been aborted, maybe, but at this point the energy has to go somewhere, and even if the proper breach is created  _ right now _ , it won’t be fast enough. That requires the sub-hyperspace tunneling to be successful, and who knew if the conversion from quintessence to phantom energy would be. The entire chain was failing. At worst, the oscillator would become another firing chamber as the energy found any way it could out of its containment, and without direction from the true firing cylinder and careful calculations from the computer to pre-set coordinates, it wouldn’t really  _ go _ anywhere. 

The way out is up. So Destin starts climbing, sprinting up a set of maintenance stairs as fast as her short legs will go, and thankfully the stairs are enclosed, ensuring that at least most of the fire and destruction will be kept away. 

There are flights and flights of stairs, and only her training keeps her going when her lungs start burning. There are a couple of explosions in the oscillator that shake the stairwell, throwing her off her feet and painfully onto her back, but she gets up and keeps running. Closer to the surface, smoke starts filling the narrow stairwell, and she thanks the stars for her radiation suit that has a self-contained oxygen system. Her pad is still going off, making a racket that echoes around the space and her head aches from the unrelenting input. 

Right at the top, another obstacle. The stairwell is blocked by a pillar, fallen through a blown-open hole in the wall and laying several feet high across the stairs. Of course it is, it has been too easy so far. Only meters past it is the ladder to the surface hatch. The pillar is still on fire, a smoldering, long-burning fire that sends colored sparks up as wires are burnt and lights pop, melting the interior electronics. For a second, she mourns between the internal panicked thoughts. All that work, the careful laying out of millions and billions of meters of wire and chips and switches and diodes. All melting away. 

Only a second, and she pushes it aside. There has to be a way over. Her suit doesn’t provide enough mobility to climb over, it wouldn’t melt in the fire but she simply can’t reach far enough in it. Not enough finger grip. If she takes it off, she only has as long as she can hold her breath before the smoke enters her lungs and she stops being able to breathe, or think. May not be long enough to climb up and over.

But if she rips the suit, cuts it away and keeps on the oxygen tank and mask, maybe she can make it.

She does just that, pulling a sharp tool from her belt and slicing at the more vulnerable area of the elbow joint. It’s quick work to get the arms and legs off the suit, and she sloppily cuts around the face mask to get the hood off while preserving the loose oxygen lines connected to the small tank on her back. The front of the suit hangs open like an oversized jacket, the material too thick to cut through but the zipper busted open. 

Stepping up to the pillar, she doesn’t even think before grabbing handholds and hauling herself up the side. The adrenaline holds out long enough to get halfway up before she realizes her hands are burning. Literally. The metal feels like putting her hands in an oven. The heat then becomes recognizable through the soles of her boots, and she screams out in a mix of rage and pain. She keeps going. There’s no other option. It’s be burnt on this side of the pillar or the other side, and she will be damned if she loses use of her hands just to fail and die anyways. 

At the top she stands up and knows her boots are melting, leaving black tar in the shape of her steps. It's a jump higher than her height to the floor on the other side, and she needs to land on a single stair to avoid injury, but there isn’t time or a safe spot to lower herself down. 

She jumps. 

The initial landing isn’t the worst, but her shoe, gooey and slick, slips on the stair and her ankle twists, her knees slam down onto the stairs and she cries out. Hands shooting out to catch her means more pain as her burnt palms strike the stair edge, and another scream rips out. The oxygen tank slams painfully against her back for a third time. But she’s alive and the planet is still together. Who knows how long she has, there’s no time to waste, so she clenches her jaw as hard as she can, yanks her leather gloves on, and starts up the ladder. 

_ Blessedly _ , the hatch isn’t bolted. The cold air stings her face and smoke plumes out of the tunnel as she opens it. Above her is a battlefield of sky, X-wings and TIE fighters in a complicated dance as the very few X-wings presumably try to disengage long enough to get away. The ground for a mile before her is a burning landscape of broken fighter ships, completely unrecognizable by faction or design.  

She stumbles out into the snow. There’s nothing nearby, not even a single snowbike, and not a trooper in sight. Destin thinks belatedly that she should take her boots off before the damage is any worse, but she doesn’t want to know if they’ve melted to her feet or not. It doesn’t matter yet. 

The nearest hangar isn’t too far, stocked with snowspeeders. If she can get there, maybe she can make it to a ship hangar. They have to be evacuating, maybe there’s still ships going out. It is a long shot and her rational mind says that there’s no way she’ll make it before the planet entirely destabilizes, and the thought is reinforced by a violent ground tremor that almost knocks her off her feet. In the distance, there’s a deep, resonant crack unlike anything she’s ever heard before. Then another. 

Still, she has to try. She begins running again, away from the oscillator and towards where she knows the hangar is, just over the rise. The cracking sounds continue. 

Before she gets there, another tremor takes her to her knees. She looks up to the hill, and knows she won’t make it. Skyler looks around for her datapad, to send whatever messages she can before the whole planet goes, and doesn’t find it. She must have left it on the other side of the pillar in her haste. Unbidden, tears begin to roll down her cheeks. She doesn’t feel the sadness that comes with them, the overwhelming grief and fear, it is still far away from her mind with the adrenaline, but her body knows and will cry anyways. 

Then a shout from the hill. She looks up again, eyes blurry, to see an indistinct vehicle coming down the side. It stops next to her, and her ringing ears, which to this point weren’t even noticeable given her other injuries, barely make out the words, and certainly not the voice attached to them. 

“Commander! Get in!”

A couple pairs of white-armored hands grab her by the arms and yank her from the snow and into the speeder. Destin is strangely boneless all of a sudden, and she can barely find the energy to say “The core…”

“The planets gonna crumble! We’re evacuating!” Shouts the same voice as if it didn’t hear her, and the speeder revs back up the hill at top speed. As it goes down the other side, Destin sees through her unwelcome tears that there’s a trooper transport ship at the bottom, in front of the hangar she had been trying to get to. There are more troopers hanging out of the open ramp door, gesturing frantically. 

“Selene,” one shouts, “we have to go now!”

“I’ve found the Commander!” She shouts back, and how did Destin not recognize her voice? She isn’t recognizing anything much now, and she tries to stand and fails miserably when pain shoots up her legs from multiple points. 

“I’ve got you, Commander,” Selene says  and ducks down to heft Destin’s dead weight up in a fireman’s carry. She jogs off the speeder and to the transport, not pausing as the ramp closes behind her and the other two troopers. 

Before she knows it, she is on the emergency med cot in the little side room on the transport and nearly delirious. Whether it is from pain or panic or simple mental overload, she has no idea, but her consciousness fades in and out as Selene peers over her, shining a light into her eyes and checking her vitals. 

“Felix, Felix!” Selene yells into the hallway, and Destin chuckles. How is Felix here? Impossible. There’s no way the tall droid would have gotten onto the same transport. The droid wasn’t even programmed for emergency evacuation procedures. Droids were disposable. 

Except Felix. She sobs as the blinking orange droid rolls into the room. 

_ Commander, _ it beeps, and only being multi lingual for most of her damn life allows her to parse out what in all the galaxy he’s saying,  _ I will be rendering you unconscious for your examination. You are injured.  _

She laughs in earnest, and then coughs, the charred smell reaching her nose and lungs now that her oxygen mask has been removed. 

“We’ve made it to hyperspace, Destin,” says Selene, placing what is probably meant to be a reassuring hand on her shoulder, “we’ve made it out.”

It hits her all at once. They’re out. Is the planet still together? Who made it? She tried to sit up but it is a weak effort and Selene pushes her back down and twists her arm out carefully for one of Felix’s needle-hands. “No, no,” she mumbles, “I need a pad, or a comm, I need to talk to him,”

Selene hushes her, brushing bangs from Destin’s eyes. “It’ll be okay, we’ll be on the  _ Finalizer _ soon.” 

“You don’t understand…” Skyler says, weak, as the sedative takes over her system. Her eyes droop, and she sees Selene’s sad look over to Felix before her consciousness leaves her. 

-

Waking up is a similar chaos to falling asleep. There are bright lights and moving bodies and a  _ screaming _ pain in her extremities, and a pain that is barely lesser in the rest of her body. 

Felix’s rounded head fills her blurry vision, it slowly focuses as he beeps at her, but he is almost entirely unintelligible. 

“Felix, _ ”  _ she says, and then gets caught in the pain that trying to breathe enough to speak causes. Destin lets out a pained squeak and her eyes fill up with tears that blur her vision out again. “I can’t,”

She tries to lift her hands, but they’re heavy. She chokes out between little sobs, “Felix, switch to Basic.”

He’s still too quiet, and a little garbled as she hadn’t had time to calibrate the mechanical voice before the order to prep the weapon came in, but Felix speaks Basic for the first time and she can strain enough to understand. 

“ _ Commander, please do not move. You are injured. We are in medbay. You are safe.” _

“Where is Hux? How long has it been?”

He blinks more rapidly for a moment, the orange lights flashing strobe-like.  _ “Exactly two hours and thirteen minutes since we left Starkiller Base. I do not know the status of General Hux.” _

That brings a fresh welling of tears. What if he didn’t make it?

_ “I will try to ascertain his location.” _

“Thank you,” she whispers, not knowing what she would do without this droid. 

Destin gasps as she tries to shift and a sharp pain lances through her chest. She tries to move her hands to her chest, but as she gets them within view she sees they are tightly bandaged and clunky. She can’t even separate out her fingers though when she tries it cause that more severe pain to register at the forefront again. Mother above, what has she done? 

_ “Commander, breathe. Vitals spiking. Heart rate over one hundred bpm. Administering sedative.” _

“Don’t--” she says, but the pinprick is still noticeable through the pain, and a cool feeling floods through her. She just barely hears Felix calling to a medbay nurse before she’s under again.

-

Things are quieter the next time she wakes. There is no frantic flashing of lights in her eyes. Actually, the room is dark, and still. 

At least, until she tries to move again. Her cry of pain bounces off the walls of the small room and Felix whirs to life from the nearby corner. Deftly, his arm spindles and telescopes out to hit two buttons connected to her bed. One lets off a small red flash, and the other stays depressed. 

“ _ Please do not speak, Commander. You are safe.”  _

She tries to breathe through the pain. “I...know that…” Honestly, there’s too much to feel to leave room to think clearly. 

_ “The medication will suppress the pain soon.” _

Ah, the depressed button is a pain drip, and looking down she can see the tube tucked under the bandages on her wrists, her wrists likely immobilized to avoid jarring the needle. Beyond that is a tubular, dark contraption on each hand. Past the haze of pain that is very slowly fading into a haze of...something, she can recognize those are probably portable bacta tanks. Past that, she realizes the majority of her body is strapped to the bed. Wide, flexible pieces of fabric are clipped across her shins, thighs, hips, and upper chest. 

“Why am I tied down?” It feels like her voice should be as wrecked as the rest of her but it is clear minus the thread of agony. 

_ “For your safety. You were inadvertently threatening to injure yourself further in your prior panic.” _ Felix replies, his spine widening slightly to allow his face to come down to her level. 

She sighs carefully. “I’m okay now. Please release me.”

Felix does so, and then she speaks again. “Where is everyone.” 

_ “Estimated personnel losses from Starkiller Base are at sixty percent. Current population on the  _ Finalizer _ is eighty-one thousand--” _

“You know what I mean Felix. Your reasoning processors are stronger than that.” She’s far too tired and aching to be frustrated, and the words sigh out of her mouth with the minimal effort it takes to speak. 

There is a long pause, in which time Felix twists his hands around in circles in a sort of nervous tic. She can’t hear the little metallic click-click-click she knows is associated with the motion, and tries to keep her cool. 

Finally, the droid blinks more brightly in the eyes, a physical representation of his vocal chip activating.  _ “Currently the locations of most personnel on Starkiller Base are marked as missing in action on the database roster. Individuals are checking in as time passes. I have marked you as alive and in medbay. The locations of those you are logged as spending the most time with are as follows.” _

Destin holds her breath. 

_ “Firing Crew, numbering at fifteen: MIA _

_ Vice Admiral Annis: MIA _

_ Master Comms Officer Jiset: MIA _

_ Comms Crew, numbering at fifteen: ten on  _ Finalizer _ , five MIA  _

_ Admiral Doshir: MIA _

_ Colonel Datoo: on  _ Finalizer

_ Systems Management Crew, numbering at forty-five: thirty-two MIA, thirteen on  _ Finalizer,  _ two deceased _

_ SP-2034 and squad, numbering at twenty: Seventeen on  _ Finalizer _ , including 2034, three deceased _

_ General Hux: MIA” _

The breath goes out in a  _ whoosh _ and she’s left holding back tears for a variety of reasons. “How long has it been?” 

_ “Three standard cycles.” _

“Three days?” She chokes out. Those who are MIA are very likely truly KIA, and she can’t bear to think of it. “You haven’t found him?”

_ “I have made digital inquiries on your behalf. I cannot leave medbay due to your condition.” _

He damn well can, but she rationally knows he can’t be rolling around the  _ Finalizer _ on his own. “Then what is my condition.”

_ “It would be best to page the doctor.” _

“Tell me.”

There’s a sturdy, low table next to her bed, and Felix turns it around the hinge bolted to the corner so it faces her pillow. Then, in a smooth motion he had to have practiced, he braces his extended arms on the table and retracts his spine, angling forward until his wheels land on the table. He telescopes in his arms, and he ends up facing her in astro mode. He’s almost never in astro mode, but it is certainly more friendly looking, and he very likely knows this. 

_ “According to your chart, your injuries are varied. Would you prefer I list them from highest or lowest severity?” _

It way be seen as cowardly, but Destin is of the mind that worst should be last, to leave space to think about it. 

“Lowest first.”

_ “Very well, Commander. Your hearing loss is moderate, will likely heal to mild with time. No surgical intervention. You have third degree facial burns and neck burns, bacta has been applied. Two cracked ribs, no complications foreseeable. You hands sustained first degree burns on the palmar side, second degree on the dorsal side, as you have seen they are in portable bacta suspension. Estimated healing at ninety percent. Minor ligament tears in your knees, no surgical intervention. Possible ligament tears in your shoulders, pending further examination.” _

Felix stops. “That’s it?” She asks, because the blinking indicates it isn’t. The droid has gotten too proficient at imitating human mannerisms. 

_ “I will call the doctor.” _

“Felix!” She squeaks angrily, chest and (now she knows) cracked ribs burning, but Felix has already pressed the call button. 

The doctor comes in after a matter of minutes, looking haggard. “Commander, good to see you are lucid.” He sighs. “Are you experiencing any unidentifiable pain?”

“No. I’d like to know the worst of my injuries, as my droid seems to be reluctant to inform me.” Destin tries to put as much strength and command behind her tone as possible, but taking a deep breath is all but impossible. 

He pulls up a chair. She immediately knows this is serious. He clasps his hands together in his lap. “We received several thousand officers and troopers from Starkiller Base. Thankfully, most injuries were minor. Some were critical. Our resources got expended on both ends, and therefore some individuals who fell in the middle, such as yourself, could not get accurate care immediately. Our twenty full suspension bacta tanks were filled by critical cases in the officer ranks. We managed to get portable tanks on your hands, as we understood they are essential to your work. However, at this point, the damage to your feet cannot be healed appreciably by bacta suspension.”

The world stops. “Damage?”

The doctor sighs, and she feels true regret in the expression. “The burns to your feet were severe, and the addition of your boots and socks compounded the problem. If we had been able to get you into surgery to detangle the extremities from them and reattach what we could, well, maybe bacta would have been helpful now. But that wasn’t possible. According to the preliminary scan, the delicate tarsals and metatarsals of your feet are partially melted, your toes are indistinguishable from the rubber material of your boots, and your heels are severely misaligned with your lower leg bones. The skin and muscle is irreparable. Our current course of action is amputation and replacement with mechanical prostheses. The tibia and fibula ends appear functional, which is good in this kind of situation, but the skin of your calves did sustain some second degree burns and that may affect muscle usage.”

It is then that Destin realizes her feet won't move. She looks down, but the doctor puts a hand on her arm. “They are still there. They are wrapped in an antibacterial solution and the lower legs have been entirely numbed to reduce pain and accidental further injury. We can and will delay the decision on a surgical procedure until a time we can devote full attention to it. Until then, we will tend to your other complaints and let you rest.”

The doctor carefully squeezes her arm, and gets up. “Don’t hesitate to page if you need it, but your droid is well equipped for small issues.” He then leaves, not giving her time to formulate any questions. 

“Felix.” She says quietly. “I want to go to sleep now.”

“ _ Yes Commander.” _

\- 

Days pass. How many she only knows by routinely asking Felix when she wakes. After the fifth time, he begins volunteering the information. The easiest way to heal, she’s learned, is to sleep a lot to avoid any stressors. Moving is stress, and thinking is unacceptable. There is nothing good to think about, even with her normally positive outlook. It may be an abuse of sedatives, but it is easier this way. 

So Skyler is drifting in and out of a medically-induced mostly-painless haze when the door opens. She assumes it's another nurse, as she still has time before the next surgeon’s appointment. Those have been fun, the few there have been. At least probably she has time she thinks. It was hard to keep track of, even with Felix’s help, and the prolonged sleeping wasn’t doing any favors in that department. 

It is a lot of effort to turn her head and look, or rather it feels that way, so she doesn’t. She waits, but no voice is forthcoming. Maybe she’s hearing things. Haha, she laughs to herself, with what hearing? The world had been a lot quieter since the oscillator. 

She falls back asleep. The only way  she knew was waking up, again, an undetermined time later, to the overhead lights dimmed and the breathing blue lights of Felix in sleep mode in the corner. 

It is still silent, but her senses, honed from quiet moments in tense situations with officers that were much better at diplomacy than her, tell her she isn’t alone. Felix didn’t count. 

“Hello?” She croaks softly. 

Felix’s lights switch to the orange of wakefulness, and his eyes blaze with the semi-intelligent color.  _ “Commander,”  _ he starts, but then pauses and she can see out of the corner of her eye his hands switching to a pair of syringes, his only true weapons. 

_ “Identify.” _

“Tell your droid not to try and stab me.” A subdued voice says. “I don’t feel like breaking it.”

The threat isn’t implicit in their tone, but Destin would rather not have her droid smashed against a wall today. Or ever again. She is now horribly fond of the metal-and-wired annoyance. “Felix,” she takes a tired breath, “stand down.”

_ “Commander--” _

“Stand down.”

With clear reluctance in the movement of his arms, he lowers them and stands still.  _ “Acknowledged.” _

Destin roves her eyes around as far as she can, then sighs. “I’d prefer you talk to me where I can see you…unless you just want to creepily watch me sleep more?”

She is making a rude assumption, but honestly it has been a terrible few days and she has little patience for pleasantries if others aren’t going to offer first. There’s a sigh that must be loud if Destin can hear it, and then she sees a curtain of dark auburn hair enter her peripheral vision. The hair shifts, the chair moves, and she is left with a fuzzy side image of Caez. With effort, she turns her head to rest her peeling cheek on the pillow, and the image clarifies. The pain of it is distant, but still there. Drugs were wearing down, then. It is possible she is getting addicted, but there is nothing to do about that until she doesn’t need them anymore. 

There’s a achingly awkward silence, then Caez says, “Your body is a bit fucked, huh.”

“So I’ve been told.” Destin had never been to great at sarcasm before, but this is a good exception. She blinks slowly, tracing the scars across Caez’s face. They must have hurt. This is the longest they’ve looked at one another, though Caez’s eyes keep flicking around. They’re uniquely attractive, in a way that is sharp as opposed to Destin’s softness. 

“...Kylo is here too.” Caez says, a complete departure from the aborted attempt at the prior conversation. Destin doesn’t bother to ask what they mean, it is clear that Kylo isn’t in the room with them, unless he is hovering near the door. Either way, she doesn’t care.

“A lot of people are here.” She says, very quietly, and she almost can’t hear herself outside the echo in her own skull. 

They go back to looking at one another. Caez’s green eyes are bright, dotted with orange shines from Felix’s lights. The effect is vaguely haunting. For a fleeting moment, Destin wonders what Caez sees in her, burnt and exhausted on a med cot, her body a higher percent bandages than clear skin. A Force insensitive, likely a person of entire unimportance in the gazes of those with the Force, or on the greater scheme of the galactic plan. Why are they even here?

Without further discussion, Caez reaches out, a gloved hand moving towards her upper body. Destin doesn’t think, she flinches away. The hand stops and as Destin looks between it and its owner, she sees the almost stricken look on Caez’s face. Eyes wide, mouth slightly open as if they were going to say something, hair slipping over their shoulder like water. 

Caez retracts the hand quickly, fisting it into their lap. “That wasn’t...I’m sorry.” They say, looking what is probably unfairly upset given Skyler is  _ losing her feet.  _

She can only hope her frustration is bleeding through on a Force-identifiable level. Somewhere, far away where she doesn’t need medication to sleep or not be in searing pain, she feels bad for Caez, and abhorred by her own rudeness. But that place is far away indeed. 

It may be working, as Caez abruptly stands from the chair. It slides back of its own accord. “Sorry,” they say again, and turn to go. There is a slight limp in their step that Destin notices but they are out of view so fast that she can’t tell what’s injured. She just barely hears the door close. 

“Felix,” she sighs, breathy, the effort of truly vocalizing hard on her dried-out throat. “Water?”

_ “Right away Commander. I will also keep awake to screen for other visitors.” _

“Just Hux or the surgeon.” She says. At this point it is laughably unlikely it will be the former, but she has to hope. She drinks the water, and with an uncomfortable churning in her belly that could be guilt but could also just as likely be indigestion from unoccupied acid, Destin falls back asleep.

-

She is just about to fall asleep again, without sedatives this time (they cut her off, unsurprisingly, after it took a good hour to fully rouse her for the most recent check up, and Felix got quite the dressing-down for enabling her), when  _ again _ the door opens. It is still far too much effort to turn to look, but she makes an assumption. 

“I don’t know why I can’t keep the datapad.” The medbay staff had given her one for a short time when she had insisted on doing her own research on the amputation surgery, but they kept taking it away when they thought she needed a break. She was  _ fine _ . With her hands out of the tanks, it wasn’t any extra effort to hold up the pad. To add insult to injury, no pun intended, the pad wasn’t connected to the intra-ship network either. She could do literally nothing on it except read medical articles. 

There’s a longer silence than she would expect from one of the medbay staff, and Felix is being conspicuously silent, his lights blinking slowly. 

“Always trying to work, you have almost better work ethic than I do.”

By the third word she has gasped in air violently, by the eighth she is trying to remember to exhale. She clutches at her aching ribs, even though she knows it only makes the pain worse when she lets go, and twists her head around as far as it will go. 

It’s really him. Looking the same as he did last week on the base, General Hux moves further into the room until he is next to her bed. 

“You…” She says, at a loss for what else to say. There is a torrent of emotions crashing around her brain right now, and she is still trying to breathe. 

He’s standing at attention, hands clasped behind his back, looking down and across her prone form. “What have you done to yourself. I saw the chart but this...what were you thinking?”

“What was I thinking?” She repeats dumbly. 

“You’re lucky to be alive,” he continues, seeming to not really be looking at her at all, but rather at a point just next to her, “if you had followed protocol you wouldn’t--”

_ “Excuse me _ ?” Destin interrupts, the ache in her chest feeling not quite like the normal pain. 

He startles to silence, but when he opens his mouth she cuts him off again. 

“It has been a  _ week _ .”

“I’m well aware of time passing.”

She digs her fingers, still bandaged, into her side. It hurts, but it also brings clarity. “An entire week, and you come in here and start lecturing me? I thought you were  _ dead! _ ”

“I--”

“No!” Destin snaps. “How dare you come see me like this. You knew I was here the whole time? No one would tell me anything! I thought that…” She hiccups and it is agony but it is also the floodgate opening to her tears and she can’t stop it any more than she can stand up. Her throat works as she tries to hold back painful sobs and the first drops slip down her cheeks. 

“Destin…” Hux says slowly, and she looks at him to find he’s fallen out of parade rest and is looking quite distraught. It doesn’t matter, because the tears have already started. 

“Skyler, Sky, look at me.” He says, but she can’t. She shakes her head and continues to cry until Hux is taking her cheeks in his hands and turning her face to him. 

His face is so close, and she thinks briefly about how tired he looks. The dark circles under his eyes are pronounced even for him. Then she realizes he’s shushing her, trying to calm her down. 

“Skyler, shh, calm down. It’s alright, I’m fine. Shh.” He runs his gloved thumbs carefully over her cheeks to wipe away the tears and she hiccups her way to stopping. Hux grabs a tissue and lets her wipe her nose which is embarrassingly runny before bracketing in her face again. “I should have thought of you. I’m here.” 

Marvelously, and completely unexpectedly, he leans in and kisses her forehead, avoiding the slow-healing burns around the edges. He kisses her closed eyelids, her cheeks, her forehead again, calmly and systematically and when he pulls back she is staring at him in a strange open wonder. 

“There. For each day I failed to be here. Are you alright now?”

Destin nods mutely. What else is there to do? Hux has just shown more affection in ten seconds than he had in the last year, and it is taking a moment to file it all away. 

“Tell me….tell me what happened.” She manages.

With a weary sigh, he settles on the edge of the bed. His coat splays open across the sheet, and she can see strange darker splotches on it, and it has begun to fray on the button-edge. She wonders if he will tell her how those got there. 

“Starkiller is finished.” He says finally, and having him say it is like losing the planet all over again. Another tear slips out but she wipes it away quickly, not wanting to distract him again with her unintentional histrionics. 

“I know.” She whispers.

His hands have slid off her face, but one now clutches the hand she was ravaging her side with. The other sits docilely in his lap, only moving to gesture when he speaks. 

“Frankly, I’m not sure how we made it off the planet. It is something of a blur. When I knew all was lost, I ran to the Supreme Leader for orders. He told me to get Kylo Ren.” He makes an irritated face. “The fool was out in the middle of nowhere, slashed to ribbons and barely alive. I managed to get to him, and the trooper contingent that followed me got us to a shuttle before everything imploded.” He laughs dryly. “The ground was  _ splitting under my feet _ , and that Force-addled idiot was raving about how it was impossible that the scavenger bested him. It was a nightmare dragging him even fifty feet through that snow.” 

Destin holds his hand even tighter. She had thought that her escape was cutting it close, but the powers that be must have been watching over Hux for him to make it.

“Did someone tell you what happened to me?” She asks.

Hux hums. “SP-20...Selene. She told me how they found you. That’s all.”

“You know...how did they find me?” She honestly doesn’t know. It felt like some stroke of insane luck. 

When he laughs this time, it is somewhat genuine. “I thought I would never say this, but your droid actually made himself worth something.” There is a whirring of servos from Felix, but they ignore it. “Apparently, the little sneak had put a tracker on you. Luckily for it, Selene believed it when it found her and said it could find you, and that you were injured.”

Destin’s mouth hangs open. “ _ Where?” _

Hux’s hand leaves hers, and slides up her arm. It stops near the elbow joint, and starts massaging around. “You feel that tiny spot, like a bead?”

She does. “What the...Felix!” 

“It was installed while you slept, and Felix was using it to keep track of your health. If you’d like it taken out, obviously that can be done, but I quite like having tabs on you.” 

Sputtering angrily, she points at the droid. “You are in so much trouble when I get out of this bed.” 

Felix beeps and it feels like the noise is disbelieving. Cheeky droid, won’t even answer her in Basic.

“Anyways,” Hux continues, “tell me what happened.”

She relays the tale, and ends it off with a self-deprecating statement. “I know it was stupid. I was stupid. I shouldn’t have gone at all.”

“I’m actually glad you did. It seems appropriate to tell you now, the firing crew didn’t make it. You could have been among the dead very easily.” 

A stunned silence. “All of them?”

Hux nods. 

“Stars…” She says, suddenly a bit empty again. She rallies. She has to. “Tell me what’s been going on since.”

“Chaos,” he says quickly, “we have people everywhere and no one knows where they  _ should _ be. There simply aren’t enough hours in the cycle to try and organize everyone. I’m doing what I can but…”

“What is Starkiller Base now?” She asks. Suddenly, she has to know. There were theories, but the true fate of it is unknown to her.

“It…” Hux looks away briefly. “It is a star. There’s nothing left.”

Her eyes unfocus. Each time it is confirmed hurts no less than the time before. A hole begins to yawn in her chest that is quickly sucking in all her automatic thoughts and feelings, things she can’t help but think. All that work, gone. Her most successful project. Her life’s work, mostly likely. Part of her died with that planet, she knows, but holding back the grief while she tries to simply survive the aftermath of its loss is more important. 

Hux’s hand finds hers again. “Destin, there is nothing you could have done. The Resistance had intel we couldn’t anticipate. Besides, you have no stake in the outcome, I am possibly looking at the end of my command.”

“No stake?” She replies. She pulls her hand away. “How could you say that?”

“What do you mean?”

“How can you believe I had no stake in it? I was never looking for glory, Hux, but that planet was as much mine as it was yours. My name is on the blueprints too. Do you not remember? But no one will ever know what I did, what a marvel it really was. And I probably won’t live to even know that for sure, either. It’s gone. Everything.” Now she’s crying again, and she shoves her cramping hands over her face and pushes the heels of her palms into her eyes.

“Skyler, please,”

“Don’t Skyler me! I put more into that Base, that weapon, than you can comprehend. I touched, with these hands, almost every part of it, and it is all gone. It’s partly my fault.” She pauses. “My name is on the blueprints.” She repeats, and this time it is not with pride, it is with realization. 

He stands up abruptly. “It is not your fault. You followed orders. No one will know how much of Starkiller was by your hand for now, but that is for the best. Keep your pride close, as these are dangerous times and I cannot lose you.”

His eyes are almost wild. She suddenly fears what he might do to protect those he cares for. General Hux had never presented himself as a man who did anything by half. “What of you, Hux?” She asks. “You can’t take the fall for it, you didn’t--”

“No.” He says sharply. “This is Kylo Ren’s fault. Everything came down to him, and he failed. We did our part, and it was...flawless.” He seems to get pulled out of his righteous fury for a moment, likely thinking of how those beams looked streaking through the sky. As she watches, he comes back to himself. He refocuses back on her face. “You will not get dragged down because of me, and I will not be because of him. I will make this clear. You have nothing to worry about.” 

He drops a comforting hand into her hair, a habit he seemed to have picked up from all the times she has been in medbay. “Rest, Destin, please. Leave things to me.”

She has no choice, really. “Okay Hux. Come back soon.”

“I will.”

-

“Ankle.”

“Knee.”

“Ankle.”

“ _ Knee.” _

_ “Destin--” _

_ “It’s my body, Hux!” _

The indignant screech is followed by a coughing fit, and Felix wastes no time in elbowing the General away to give Destin water. She sips at it carefully, trying not to splutter the liquid over herself, and it finally subsides. Collapsing back on the pillows, she glares. “You really have no opinion in this.”

“I do,” he replies, affecting a calm air, “the surgeons won’t operate without my say-so.”

Destin scoffs angrily. “I’ve already done the research, a prosthesis from the knee provides greater overall mobility and a better rate of natural walking movement after PT.”

“According to  _ some _ research. There’s no reason to cut off more of you for not much more result. This is silly.”

“The complexity of ligaments and tendons in the knee makes for a better connection with the prosthesis than at the ankle joint. It’ll be cleaner if they just remove the tibia and leave the patella--”

“Since when did you become a prosthetic surgeon!”

“Since when did you!” Destin shoots back. 

There’s a stormy silence in which the two stubborn officers stare at one another. Surprisingly, Hux breaks first. “I understand what you’re feeling right now, but you have to look at all the options.”

“No you don’t.”

He looks puzzled. “What?”

She struggles to sit up some more, and Felix reinforces his arms to support her as she shimmies the dead weight of her feet up the bed. Her broken ribs flare as she shuffles, but it's dull enough she can ignore it. This is more important. Situated more like someone who can make her own choices, rather than like an invalid, she levels the angry look at him again. “You’ve been raising your voice for my benefit. You keep looking at my hands, and you don’t look me in the eye, you look at the skin on my face. You  _ know _ , but that doesn’t mean you understand. And I’ll admit in some way I engineered my own suffering, but what else was I to do? Abandon my post? Abandon Starkiller when I could maybe have done something? No, I had no idea that the Resistance was in the oscillator, but no one would answer me on comms so obviously not. But I  _ tried _ . For it, I ended up like this. I am willing to give more to this cause if it is asked of me, but for the galaxy’s sake let me make my own decision on how I give. I think I deserve that courtesy, as it is clear that I am in this bed and you are not, therefore I am best equipped to understand.”

The silence echoes in the wake of her speech, and Felix quietly rolls backwards to give them space. Considerate droid, she thinks. 

Hux breaks his mask again. How strung-out and exhausted must he be to let her move him so easily? Of course, she knows to an extent, his babbling about Kylo Ren and fears over his command was clear enough. But she has still never seen him this tired, and yet he wastes his time arguing with her over her recovery. The fact is, she is more concerned about her return to duty than he is about his. They could put her under for surgery and then decide it is too much work or cost, they could get another to do her job, and she never wakes up. Or her body could reject the prosthesis. Permanently crippled engineers have no place in the First Order. Their shared future dream, cruel as it may seem, is for the able-bodied only, and with the advancement of prosthetics and medicine, that is a reasonable request for most. Hux, at least, still has all his pieces working in the right place. No matter what happened to Starkiller, it was made and fired successfully, it furthered the goals of the Order, and so he, by extension, succeeded. He has the armor of necessity and glory protecting him from removal. 

Anyone with enough brain cells could do her job. Maybe not as well, but she could be replaced. 

It doesn’t matter at the moment because he breaks anyways, moving forward to lean his palms onto the bed and loom over her. She tilts her head up to see him clearly. “I know,” he says, the closest she’s ever heard to him admitting he is wrong, “I know, but I don’t want this to be harder on you.”

She smiles slightly at the sincerity in his tone, tears welling up in her eyes. It is a combination of stress and relief. She’s really so very tired. “At this point, I believe any further difficulty is a negligible addition.”

He huffs a laugh, short and pained. “I should have answered you. It was chaos. But I should have--”

Destin reaches up, ignoring the pain, wraps her bandaged hands around the back of his head, and pulls him down. Their lips meet, softly, and she is surprised he doesn’t pull away. To her, there is little difference between kissing anywhere on another, but for him it may be a step forward, and one that his is not necessarily ready or willing to take. But she decides her need for comfort is more pressing, and his rejection at this point would be an important distinction to make in their so-unspoken relationship. 

He doesn’t reject her. He also doesn’t push it any farther, but that is for the best, given her face still aches and she hasn’t truly brushed her teeth in days. Still, it is a sweet, quiet thing. She breathes out of her nose and he ends the kiss, leaning back and blinking at her. 

“Sorry,” she says, not apologetic in the slightest. 

“I’ll let it slide,” he replies wryly and reaches up to stroke her hair, her scalp being one of few places that is entirely uninjured. 

Hux’s comm beeps, and he starts slightly. Destin does too; for a moment there it was like the rest of the ship didn’t exist.

“I have to go,” he says, “there’s still so much to do.”

“I wish I could help.”

“You are helping.” 

Destin will be damned if that is not one of the kindest things he has ever said to her. She smiles again, ignoring the cracking feeling it gives her face. “I’ll let you know when the surgery is scheduled?”

“I’ll know.” Hux taps the pad in his coat pocket and stands up straight again, the reassuring presence of his hand leaving her head. “I’ll tell them to go with your decision.”

“Thank you, Hux.”

He hushes her. “Rest, Sky. I’ll be back when I can.”

“No hurry,” she says, the tension leaving her all at once and making her eyes droop, “I’ll be here.” She doesn’t notice him leave.

-

The surgery, surprisingly, goes off without a hitch. Small favors. With all the mess of officers who were injured on Starkiller, the surgeons, doctors, and nurses are strung thin and functioning more on stim tabs than sleep. But still, it happens, and it goes well. The first cycle after is watching carefully for rejection, but it doesn’t come. The connection between the prosthetic and her knee is wrapped in bacta strips and again in clean gauze to promote healing at the attachment site. Everything is attached to the lower leg: bone, ligament, tendon, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, etc, but if the skin doesn’t anchor well into the pre-made spaces it won’t make too much difference. 

Destin isn’t going to be going anywhere for a while yet, still. The physical therapy for lower leg prosthesis is a couple months, and she is still not fully healed everywhere else. Her hands are almost totally healed from the mini-tanks, but she has been given stretchy finger tools to work with, to assure the subtle scarring doesn’t limit her dexterity. The ribs will be another month yet, and the rest of the burns will have to heal naturally, given the shortage of bacta. She is simply glad they aren’t infected. 

Her ears...well, given recent projections, if she’s careful with her noise exposure, they still will likely heal themselves to only mild hearing loss. Even with the marvels of modern medicine, the fever she experienced coupled with the sirens from Starkiller made an impressive cocktail of damage, and it cannot be fixed by surgery. Thankfully, the tinnitus should subside. 

Unfortunately, the medical interventions are not over. Once her hands had come out of the tank, Destin realized she could not lift her right arm above her head. A tear in the ACL, the doctor said, not uncommon but a complete tear like hers would require surgery. Then it’s a month or so from  _ that _ to let the ligament heal back together. So really, she isn’t leaving medbay for what looks to be another two months. 

It isn’t the worst. Selene shows up the day after her surgery, and they talk about what it’s been like on the ship. The trooper confides that Captain Phasma survived the meltdown, and so did many of her troops. The survivors of the base, all of them, are all being transferred to her division. She also says that she heard the other Generals and Admirals from across the Order were coming to the  _ Finalizer _ , likely for a strategy and damage assessment conference. Fact was, thousands of soldiers made it off the base (though thousands more did die), and now they needed to figure out where to put them all. Likewise, hundreds of transports and other technical resources were lost. 

She asks Selene to check in on some of Destin’s friends, those fairly low on the command chain, to see who made it and who didn’t. The trooper seems uncertain, but Destin reassures her that she can take the news. Everyone  _ still _ refuses to give her a connected datapad to check herself, and Felix refuses to do the death-march-esque roster list again. Selene reluctantly promises, and leaves her to rest. 

Hux comes by next, when Destin is busy forcing her grip against the evil resistance bands. 

“It went well, I’ve been told.” He pulls up a chair next to her bed, and Destin hits the button to lower her bed so they are face to face.

“It did.” She confirms. “I should be ready for duty in a couple of months.”

“Many of the injured have been transferred to other ships that still have a full stock of supplies, so your doctor should be able to focus on your recovery.”

“Yay,” she says lazily, and she smugly smiles at his off-put expression. “How are you?”

Hux drags a hand down his face. He wouldn’t dare do that in front of many, she’s sure. “Tired,” he admits, “the rest of the higher command will be here in a few days, and I have to explain what happened.”

“They’ll understand, Hux.” She says reassuringly. She has to believe that. She has to keep them both calm.

“Will they? Starkiller was supposed to be foolproof. Unstoppable.”

Destin laughs lowly. “Nothing is perfect. I knew that when we built it. But it was almost there, and the Resistance is made to find weaknesses. I would have hoped it would stand strong for longer,” at this, she has to wipe at her eyes, grief coming up her throat again, “but it was a success.”

“Five planets, gone.” Hux says, quiet. It is both horrifying and awe-inspiring. But war is war. He looks up at her, gaze unwavering. “Do you regret it? Hosnian Prime?”

Destin can’t lie, she knew the seat of the Senate would be a primary target. It was also where she went to school. There were likely people she’d met before on-planet when Starkiller struck. But she had left everything behind when she defected to the Order, and regret at this point would only mean she moved nowhere at all. Commitment was just that, there was no getting off the ride now. The less she knew of who or what was on those planets, the better. 

“I don’t. Regret won’t serve a purpose. I helped build that machine and if I didn’t feel regret when we laid the plans, I won’t now.”

Hux lets out a breath he had been clearly holding. “Good.”

“Were you worried?”

He seems embarrassed. “Vaguely. What with the trooper defection to the Resistance, I’ve been on edge about all our outside additions.”

She can’t really blame him. Despite the months they spent together on Starkiller, and the months on the  _ Finalizer _ before that, doubt can creep in. “Don’t be. I’m in for the long haul.”

Hux reaches out and takes her hand, the one not still tied up in glorified rubber bands. “I’m glad you joined us, Destin.”

“I am too.”

They smile goofily at one another for several seconds, until Hux lets out a sudden “Oh!” Destin looks at him critically as he squeezes her hand once and pulls away, digging in his coat pocket. He pulls out his pad and swipes the screen to life.

As he looks down, he says, “This is the second time doing this without much ceremony, but there would have been a formal event on the base after we’d fired on D’Qar and everything had settled. Admiral Doshir had already cleared it, though at that point I’d hardly needed his approval.”

Destin raises an eyebrow.

“Now that Doshir isn’t with us anymore--”

“Doshir’s dead?” Destin asks, shocked. This is the first she’s heard of any high command casualties. 

Hux nods his head in confirmation. “He’d come down from the  _ Finalizer _ to oversee the final preparations of the weapon.”

There’s an unintentional moment of silence. Doshir was a bastard, but he was competent and fair. His loss was truly a loss for the Order. 

“Anyways,” Hux continues, verbally shaking off the melancholic mood, “there’s been a gap in command, even with moving people up, and we are trying to fill all the spaces quickly. You were already slated due to your work on the base, but this provided a convenient and unique opportunity.”

He turns the pad around so she can look at it, and there, glowing in dark blue in the center of a formal letter of appointment:

_ Rear Admiral _

“By the Order, Hux,  _ what _ ?” Destin asks, incredulous.

“It says what, on the screen.” 

“I know that, I--” she unceremoniously snatches the pad from him, holding it closer and really looking at the words. “This is...two ranks.” She mutters. 

“Three, actually. There are two levels of Rear Admiral. You were going to be promoted to Captain by virtue of service, I had put in a recommendation for Second Rear Admiral upon hearing that, but with the current spaces in the command chain for the  _ Finalizer _ , First was simple to procure.” 

“This is too much.” 

“It is exactly the right amount. You are wasted in lower ranks.”

“People are going to call favoritism, nepotism even. They know you and I are…” she struggles with finding a word for a moment, “close.”

“You have done enough that those dissenters will soon see their error. Destin, I need someone on the Navy side that I can trust, as we try to rebuild from what we lost. You are one of the few who truly understands what that means.”

Destin shakes her head, the pad falling limp into her lap. “I’ll lose my crew.” As soon as she says it, she wonders if her crew even survived. She sees Hux’s mouth open and close silently, and knows better than to ask at the moment. “I’m used to getting my hands dirty, working manually. I’m not built for meetings and non-stop scheduling and holocalls.”

“You can do both,” Hux promises. “You’ll be lead of all major projects, the new Vice Admiral will be handling scheduling, and the new Admiral is the primary go-to for meetings. You’ll be required to go to some, of course, to assist in making major decisions, but your position is guaranteed to be more hands-on. Your inferior, the Second Rear, manages pre-existing systems. You can do this, Destin, I know you’re good for it.”

“You really think so?” She asks, a rare moment of insecurity coming to the surface. 

“I know it.” Hux says, firm. 

Destin makes up her mind. She trusts Hux, and she has to trust in herself. “Well,” she says, signing the bottom of the letter with a careful fingertip, “you’ll have to wait for your new Rear Admiral to be ready for duty. I can’t exactly go running around yet.”

He takes the pad back, his pleasure clearly written across his face. “I’ll have someone bring you a new pad. You have some training to go through, and some formalities to complete. Paperwork and required messages and the like. By the time you’re released, you’ll be fully prepared.”

“Thank the stars,” she says happily. She would have gone entirely stir-crazy otherwise. 

“Congratulations again, Rear Admiral Destin. It will be a pleasure to work with you.”

“Thank you sir.”

-

By some medical schedule finagling and fussy messaging, Destin ends up a holo projection in the grand meeting of all the upper ranks. She laughs to herself. The actual conference is two decks above the medbay, but the doctor had refused to let her out of bed. Even Hux had done a bit of complaining on her part, however in the end the stubborn doctor would only concede to letting Felix clean her up and put part of her uniform on to take the holocall in her bed. 

At first, Destin is terrified to hear that Hux wanted her to be there. Weren’t Admiral and Vice Admiral enough? But Hux had said that the newly appointed officers had little to do with Starkiller, and her expertise and hands-on experience in the giant would be essential to explaining to details of what happened. “Don’t worry,” he promised her, “I will only call on you if strictly necessary. I remember the blueprints as well as you, but the fact stands that you were the one to help fire it, not me.”

The discussion is tentative at first, no one willing to immediately point to finger at anyone else, and the general consensus is that the Resistance got lucky. Exceedingly lucky. They manage to identify that the intruders first got in by _dropping out of hyperspace in atmo_ , which is startling enough. After that, it is simply a series of questions without answers (how did they get the shields down and others), then an air battle that could have gone to either side, and the leaked information about the weakness (which, Destin can’t help but interject, wasn’t truly a weakness but an _engineering_ _necessity)_ is attributed to FN-2187’s defection. Destin, even through the holo, can almost hear Hux’s teeth grinding when they speak of the betrayal.

“Rear Admiral Destin,” says a General from the  _ Supressor, _ a Star Destroyer that cruises the Outer Rim’s edges and escorts supplies when necessary, “if there was desire to rebuild Starkiller Base, where would the roadblocks lie?”

She startles. She was paying attention, but the meeting had been going for an hour already, and her ribs were starting to ache, automatically upping her medication drip. The question itself, as well, shakes her. “Re...rebuild it? Could we do that?”

“That’s what was asked of you, Rear Admiral.” Hux replies, giving her a meaningful look. That wasn’t what she’d really meant, but she lets it go. That could be a more private conversation. 

“The blueprints are still safely in our archive, the originals and the notated ones that we edited during the build. The first obstacle would be finding another suitable planet, and then I would assume we would want to see about changing the design to eliminate the need for such a large single oscillator. I would suggest a repetitive backup system, or a series of smaller oscillators. Frankly, I would consider making the base smaller. Easier to move, less supplies, shorter build time, easier to defend.”

“It wouldn’t be as powerful,” says the General. 

“I would argue that we had superfluous space with the first base,” she replies, “but either way, charging time would shorten as well, and even if it can only hit one target at a time, that is still far more powerful than we should need to win this war.”

There is a stunned silence, and Destin realizes with a sinking feeling that she has overstepped. 

Very slowly, the  _ Supressor  _ General says, “Pray tell, what does that mean, Rear Admiral?”

“Ah…” she puts her words together even through the encroaching fuzz on her mind, “what I mean is, the Resistance is stubborn, and the Republic is resilient. I say this knowing their culture intimately. The loss of five planets, their governmental seat, and most of their fleet should mean that if we press the advantage now, by the time we build a new base, we shouldn’t need it for more than a scare tactic to press our already tangible superiority.”

The room is staring at her. “However, I am no master strategist. I digress. To the original question: if there is to be talks of a second Starkiller, I would say it is entirely possible, and we can make edits to make it occur more swiftly. That is all.”

“Thank you,” says General Hux, and she is glad that the holo is uniform blue, as her face is flaming. “I believe that is all we should need, your surgeon stated you should not be kept for more than an hour and we have already passed that. If any more questions arise, you will be messaged.” No, the surgeon didn’t state that, but Destin deeply appreciates the excuse that doesn’t make her appear unwilling or running away.

“I will reply promptly. Good evening, all.” She says, trying to keep an air of calm, and signs off.

Once the holo is safely put away, she drops her head in her hands and slides back down the bed. It hurts, but by stars she deserves it. What an idiot. 

-

After a painful, irritating,  _ long _ two months, Destin thankfully slaps open the door pad for her quarters. She walks in on two feet that are not the ones she was born with, but by now feel almost natural. The simu-skin will have to go, she knows that much already. It catches on her uniform pants, and she’s already ripped little holes at the sides where her boot zipper has snagged. The metal and plastic of her lower legs is nothing to be ashamed of, in all honesty she thinks it looks pretty badass. 

What doesn’t look as badass is the scarring around her face. All along her hairline is the splotched, faint whitish scarring of the heat burns she sustained, and while she has been assured they will fade more with time and ointment, she feels it makes her look...damaged. While other people can pull off scars and look experienced, she feels it makes her only look small. Destin isn’t a warrior. She didn’t  _ earn _ these or anything. 

She sighs, berates herself silently for silly thoughts, and pulls her gloves off. Truthfully, she is very lucky her hands work at all, with all the explosions they've been subjected to. They don’t like to overstretch, but her fine control seems to be adequate. Still, they aren’t too pretty to look at, a blotchy tan and white, the white in little lines and splashes, and the skin no longer sits perfectly smooth over her bones. 

Otherwise, she is surprisingly intact. She won’t be overhearing any whispered conversations anytime soon, but that's really never been an important part of her day-to-day. 

Felix is already in the room, tasked earlier with preparing her quarters for her return. Everything seems to be exactly where it should be, and she smiles at the tall droid. “Thank you, Felix.”

_ “Of course, Rear Admiral.” _

At this, her face falls a bit, and she sighs. She bounces over to the bed, unable to keep the new-legs-spring out of her step despite her abruptly down mood. Sitting on the edge, she puts her chin in her hands.

_ “Do you require anything?” _

She scoffs. “You aren’t a butler droid, and I’m no longer in medbay. Please, stop.”

_ “Sorry.” _

Her slight laugh makes his lights twinkle. “Thanks.” 

Destin looks at him a long minute. “What’s next, Felix?” Practically, she knows. Her datapad is filling up with appointments and she has a veritable mountain of paperwork and correspondence to go through before the real work can begin. But still, she feels a bit lost. Her recovery felt like forever, and the reality of Starkiller Base is still sinking in. On the other hand...what  _ isn’t _ next?

Felix rolls back and forth a bit. Finally, he says,  _ “I would think that would be up to you.” _

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Destin sustains the following injuries from SKB exploding:  
> -extreme burns on extremities  
> -mild burns on face/neck  
> -ligament tears in shoulder and knees  
> -hearing loss  
> -double leg amputation  
> -broken ribs  
> -a whole hell of a lot of guilt
> 
> if you'd like to yell at me or send flowers to Destin, please go to lc-destin.tumblr.com


End file.
